It’s been a hot minute since we’ve had one of these, hasn’t it? Can’t say I’ve missed them.
One of the pleasures to watching 1989’s The Little Mermaid, the movie that kicked off the period known as the Disney Renaissance, is in taking in just how animated a movie it is. Sure it’s animated in the sense that it’s a cartoon, but I mean in the way that everything on screen is imbued with life, expression, and motion. Consider the ways that Ariel’s tail and her hair move underwater with free frenetic elasticity; or the various nuances of expression both large and small in her face, Sebastian’s, Ursula’s especially. Every visual detail of a scene is explicitly motivated, and the script, music, performances are all designed to accentuate that. There’s a reason it single-handedly pulled Disney out of a two decade slump and ushered in the studio’s second golden age.
But now in the year of Disney’s 100th anniversary, while it is still arguably reaping the rewards of The Little Mermaid’s runaway success thirty-four years ago, those old values and priorities no longer exist at the Walt Disney Company -nor apparently does the wisdom that animation as its own medium, comes with its own set of strengths that cannot be translated, either to live-action or a stilted aesthetic of animation that values realism above all -the two spheres that Disney’s Little Mermaid remake occupies. Obviously of course Disney has run into this ground before, most notably on The Lion King -the worst in this series of soulless retreads. But they evidently haven’t learned anything -granted, there is no remunerative reason for them to have, as that movie was a big hit. Still The Little Mermaid is just further proof that even against genuine effort, the real cannot replicate the formal. A live-action film cannot be a cartoon.
This was crystallized for me the moment the film was required to reenact the iconic shot where Ariel (here played by Halle Bailey) lifts herself up on a rock as the crescendo for the reprise of “Part of Your World” hits with waves crashing behind her; and the effect is rather embarrassingly tepid, Bailey unable to reach the heights of an animated character and the wave amounting to a mere splash (likely so as not to seem too unbelievable given the otherwise calm waters of the scene). It underlines the core dissonance at play here -like so many a Disney remake, The Little Mermaid is crippled by its fidelity to the original film, narratively and in this case especially visually. And you can see director Rob Marshall struggling against that, what with his musical staging sensibilities -he’s the guy who made Chicago after all -that are forced to operate under constricting new rules. At times he fares better than other directors have, notably in that his musical sequences are at least not boring. “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is actually done fairly competently, as is the ending of “Under the Sea” (though in its early going, that one certainly has trouble matching the energy of the music). But then you have sequences like the shark attack at the start or the ship going down, that can’t be separated from the original due to their beat-for-beat imitation, and can’t help but feel awkward and insufficient. This movie also has the misfortune to come out after Avatar: The Way of Water revolutionized how underwater filmmaking could look -and the mere weightless agitation effects here simply don’t cut it.
The Little Mermaid, like most of its peers, does nothing better than the original movie. For what craft there may be on-screen, and I would argue there is certainly some -the movie’s colour saturation does look generally better than trailers led us to believe - it’s all merely to recreate material that already exists in its perfected form. Nothing is different in terms of the plot, no characters are imbued with greater depth, no substantial changes are made to the flow or the themes (a handful of added scenes are there to stretch the runtime to a “serious” two hours). The most prominent changes tend to be narrative amendments, that trend that began with Beauty and the Beast of “correcting” the earlier animated movies of perceived flaws that don’t really matter. This film makes a point to emphasize that Ariel DOES NOT choose to become human just for a man, that she is not simply a naive teenager -her fascination with humans depicted in more a scientific manner; and Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) is illustrated in that same politically overcompensating way as Jasmine in 2019’s Aladdin -an explorer but critically not a colonialist, who cares about trade and science and pursuing harmony with other cultures. Once again a Disney remake forgets that it’s a fairy-tale.
And nothing more encapsulates this than the animal sidekicks rendered in ugly photorealism. Sebastian is possibly the weirdest, though voiced fairly solidly by Daveed Diggs, awkwardly animated in a manner that clearly speaks to the artists’ frustration of anthropomorphizing a realistic crustacean -the result being something resembling flash-animation eyes and a mouth drawn on a crab. Flounder (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) is completely scrubbed of his cuteness and in fact looks rather off-putting, while Scuttle is probably the most successful animation job here (changed from a seagull into a gannet), though still forced through some bizarre motions due at least in part to being voiced by Awkwafina -who unfortunately is given licence to let loose with her most obnoxious comic tendencies.
It’s quite a lot to interact with each of these, to take them seriously, and that would be enough to commend Halle Bailey, but she is also a rare bright spot of the movie overall, giving an earnest performance with what she has to work with and resonating a delightful enthusiasm that fits Ariel all throughout. She manages to give off a modestly different impression than the original character, even as her story is exactly the same, and she’s got a wonderful singing voice that is likewise appropriate to the siren song point of the film’s plot. She can act charmingly without it though, and I hope that like Lily James before her, she uses this movie as a springboard for greater projects. She has decent chemistry with Hauer-King, which is the greatest gift to his performance, being entirely uninspired without. I admire the more concerted effort to expand the world of Eric’s kingdom (even if it does raise new questions about his relationship to slavery), and actually draw parallels between him and Ariel in a way that connects them more firmly. But it isn’t sustained enough, and stinks of that obligation to outdo its predecessor in shallow performative values. Regarding other human performers, Melissa McCarthy plays up the ham effectively as Ursula and has a blast, though not to the degree an actual drag queen would have, had Disney dared to be so bold. However next to Javier Bardem as King Triton, she’s electric; he offering no interesting dimension or presence whatsoever.
The film recycles all but a couple of the original songs, and these new covers of Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin’s classics are part of its signature appeal. They’re all perfectly fine, though there’s no re-working of the songs, bar from a couple notes in “Part of Your World” that play better to Bailey’s range and style. But of course the movie needs its Original Song Oscar-bait, and for that Disney turned once again to Lin-Manuel Miranda -by now essentially their in-house songwriter. He actually contributes three new songs: the first a mundane affair for Eric called “Wild Uncharted Waters”, the second a thought-song for Ariel after she comes ashore called “For the First Time” -which unlike the others actually fits the established musical language of the film, and the third an entirely predictable but still shockingly horrendous rap called “The Scuttlebutt” performed by Awkwafina, that belongs in the dustbin of worst Disney musical choices with “A Guy Like You”, “Ma Belle Evangeline”, and “Speechless”.
The Little Mermaid opens on a quote from the Hans Christian Andersen story, a meek attempt to tie this movie back to its literary source, as though looking to affirm itself as its own interpretation rather than a mere regurgitation of a nostalgic brand. But it was never going to be anything else. Marshall makes a few valiant efforts, Bailey gives it her all, but the movie remains a weak imitation; as uninspired, pointless, and aesthetically unseemly as any of these hollow remakes have been. And it’s clear Disney isn’t stopping any time soon. The one solace may be they’re at least starting to run out of marketable titles.
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